Panama - Hardcover

McGuane, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374229422 ISBN 13: 9780374229429

Publisher: FSG 1978, 1978

Synopsis

Panama, 1978 1st Printing, by Thomas McGuane. Hardcover with dust jacket, 175 pages, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Zencey is a professor of history at Goddard College in Vermont and a contributing editor of North American Review. This is his first novel.

From Publishers Weekly

This is that extremely rare find, a first novel that is not only extremely accomplished but also quite unlike anything else. It daringly places a real person?American historian and philosopher Henry Adams?into a historic situation?the scandal in 1892 Paris over the corrupt collapse of the grand Panama Canal plan?and makes of it a dashing, sometimes touching and, yes, thoughtful thriller. Adams is sketched quickly and deftly: enterprising, sensitive, observant, still mourning the suicide of his wife years earlier, half in love with beautiful Elizabeth Cameron. We see him briefly in Panama, stealing a picture that will come to be significant; at Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (naturally), where he is much taken with a young American painter, Miriam, who seems like a new breath in his life, and to whom he becomes quickly, quixotically attached; finally in Paris, where Miriam instantly disappears, is perhaps dead. At once, Adams begins to search for her, becoming involved with Parisian police, including a fledgling fingerprint expert and his young nephew; a coroner is killed, a macabre gift arrives for Adams via a pneumatique and the political plot around the Panama scandal, which could bring down a government and create a new one, thickens. At the heart of it all, Adams barges ahead like a gallant detective with the mind of an aesthete; through his eyes Paris, on the brink of the modern age, has never seemed stranger or more alluring, its people more enigmatic. That Zencey can create a headlong read, with a piercing climax and a poignant final note, out of such esoteric material is almost miraculous. A wonderful debut. 100,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB selections.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: FSG 1978
• Publication date: 1978
• ISBN 10: 0374229422
• ISBN 13: 9780374229429
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 175